Other authors you might like

Sarah Lightman

Sarah Lightman is a London-based artist, curator and writer. She completed an Art Foundation course at Central St Martins, attended The Slade School of Art for her BA and MFA, where she won The Slade Prize and The Slade Life Drawing Prize, and has a PhD from University of Glasgow in women’s autobiographical comics. She has extensively published her research. Her artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.

Sarah co-curated Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, an internationally touring exhibition of 18 comic artists, that opened at 9 museums over 6 years. She edited Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014), that was awarded The Susan Koppelman Prize for Best Feminist Anthology (2015) and The Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Publication (2015), an Association of Jewish Studies/Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Jews and The Arts (2016).

Sarah has experience teaching and lecturing at undergraduate and graduate level including at the Universities of Glasgow (2018 and 2011-12), Roehampton (2011, 2012, 2018) and London College of Communications (2017). She has acted as an External Examiner for an MA at California College of the Arts. In addition, Sarah has led comics workshops at the Jewish Museum, London (2018), Glasgow Jewish Book Week (2018), JW3, the Jewish Community Centre for London (2012, 2013) and Koffler Centre for the Arts, Toronto (2011). She has also convened a Comics Study Day at The Slade School of Art (2014) and will be teaching at The Art Academy, London, in 2019.

Sarah also chaired the Women in Comics Conferences in 2009 and 2010, and, in 2009, co-founded Laydeez do Comics with Nicola Streeten, the most influential comics forum in the UK.

The Book of Sarah in Glasgow Herald

‘It’s a very open, candid take on your own life and thought. How easy was it to put it down on the page?

I felt this very strong need to tell my story. It was almost an unbearable need. And I only felt a release when the words that circled my head were finally written down. Sometimes these phrases were like buzzing bees in my consciousness. Now they are on the page and it is such a relief to see and hear my thoughts and feelings in the world.

I also knew that if I made art then people would stop, see and listen. Perhaps I now understand my need to be heard was exactly what I felt my parents and family never did. They couldn’t hear my voice above their own needs and anxieties, or the background noise of the family home. But on the page I could write and draw as I wanted. I could be heard and hear myself.’

Broken Frontier Book of the Week

‘Sarah Lightman’s long-anticipated project is here and it’s been well worth the wait. Lightman is, of course, the co-founder of the vitally important Laydeez do Comics group and a former Broken Frontier Awards nominee for Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews.

Exploring the complexities of families, feminism, Judaism, motherhood and art this genuinely distinctive graphic narrative provides a fresh approach to autobio comics in a book that is deeply personal but always relatable. Look for a full review at Broken Frontier in the not too distant future.’

Sarah Lightman on Bookanista

‘The Book of Sarah is a project that has covered thousands of pages of diary drawings, from hundreds of sketchbooks, beginning in 1998. These drawings chart my childhood and sibling rivalries, schooldays and intense religious orthodoxy when I studied in Jerusalem, my years at art school, a failed relationship in New York, my marriage and most recently the birth of my son. The Book of Sarah is also a feminist reparative act. My namesake, The Matriarch Sarah in Genesis, is frequently portrayed as lacking her own agency, and slips in and out of her husband Abraham’s story. I, however, am the heroine of this Book of Sarah. Furthermore, as I am commentating on my own narrative, my own book of the bible, I am in sharp opposition to Jewish traditional texts that propose an almost exclusively male intellectual heritage.’

Sarah Lightman on Resonance FM

‘Sarah Lightman traces her journey from modern Jewish orthodoxy to a feminist Judaism as she searches between the complex layers of family and family history. Jude Cowan Montague offers reflections on inheriting her name from the literally apocryphal Book of Judith. Plus music from Jewish Manchester, London and beyond. Listen in full on Resonance FM HERE.

Turnaround Graphic Novel of the Month

‘Each drawing is annotated by Lightman’s own observations, together forming a tapestry of her life from a young girl in Hampstead to present day motherhood. Poetically poignant contemplations that, much like the book’s biblical namesake, can be drawn wisdom and opened on any page. A beautiful, resonant, gallery of a graphic memoir.’

Jewish Book Week featuring The Book of Sarah

Sarah Lightman with a tantalising pre-publication copy of The Book of Sarah at Jewish Book Week, at which she spoke.

Extracts on motherhood feature in Studies in Comics

‘Harry was born 23 December 2013. Beautiful, loud, hungry. Clock of my day. Emperor of my household. At a conference on motherhood in London in June 2015 I heard Bracha Ettinger speak about ‘the three shocks of maternality’. It helped me to understand how much I am still recovering from my new reality…’

Extracts from The Book of Sarah feature in Studies in Comics (Vol 6, Issue 2), which also includes a report on contemporary comics by Jewish women co-authored by Sarah, Heike Bauer and Andrea Greenbaum.

Comics have given me a community

‘The most important role comics have played has been to give me a community. I love reading other comics and being part of this great surge by women to tell their life stories. I set up Laydeez do Comics with Nicola Streeten in 2009. We had no idea how many people would be interested in a comics forum that focused on autobiography.’ Read this fascinating interview with Sarah Lightman in Barely South Review.

Alex Fitch interviews Sarah Lightman

Alex Fitch interviews Sarah Lightman and the artists of the touring show Graphic Details in London at the Space Station 65 gallery (first broadcast 20 November 2014).

Sarah Lightman interview for Lilith Blog

Sarah discusses her personal projects, involvement with the graphic community and upcoming events, as well as novel, The Book of Sarah, with Danica Davidson in the article ‘Women’s Voices Through Comics‘ for Lilith.

‘The Book of Sarah is a project I’ve been doing since I was twenty-one or twenty-two. I called it The Book of Sarah because my namesake, the Matriarch Sarah, doesn’t have her own book, and my brother and sister are Esther and Daniel and they have the Scroll of Esther and The Book of Daniel respectively — so I had to make things fair!’